Heart of the dauphin gets royal burial 200 years on

The desiccated heart of the son of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette is to be buried in France's royal crypt, ending a 200-year-old mystery over the boy's fate after the French revolution.

Members of the British Royal Family will be among the European royalty invited to attend the ceremony next year after the French government finally conceded that the heart - now as hard as stone - was indeed that of the dauphin, the uncrowned Louis XVII.

To the joy of French royalists, the government has accepted the results of DNA tests, which link the heart to his mother's family, the Habsburgs. The ceremony at the Basilica Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, will take place on June 8 - exactly 209 years after the boy died.

"I think it's still difficult for our republic to recognise what was done to this child in the name of republicanism, and that's why it's taken so long to get this heart recognised," said the Duc de Bauffremont, a leading member of the Institute of the House of Bourbon, which aims to promote and preserve France's royal tradition and is organising the burial.

"My feeling is that even after all these years they didn't want to turn this child into a martyr. He was treated appallingly in his short and tragic life."

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Controversy has always surrounded the heart, said to have been taken from the dauphin's body following an autopsy after he died in a Paris jail in 1795. Rumours sprang up that it belonged to an imposter, and that the real dauphin had escaped.

Historians accept that the dauphin was taken to the Temple prison in Paris, with the rest of his family, in 1792. The following year - in January - his father, the king, went to the guillotine and the dauphin was separated from his mother. In October she too was guillotined.

The dauphin spent the remainder of his life in prison, held in isolation in harsh conditions - at best neglectful, according to historians; at worst, brutal - until he died, aged 10, of tuberculosis. A doctor, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, who took part in the autopsy, hid the child's heart under his coat, smuggled it out and preserved it in alcohol.

In 1830 Pelletan handed the heart over to the Archbishop of Paris, who in turn passed it on to the Comte de Chambord, a member of the Austrian royal family. It was later given to members of the Italian aristocracy, who finally returned it to France in 1975, where it was placed in a crystal urn in one of the chapels at the Basilica Saint-Denis.

In the meantime, a German clock-maker named Karl-Wilhelm Naundorff had announced in 1833 that he was Louis XVII. He was the first of a series of pretenders all claiming to be the young king, having fled France for a variety of European countries, including England and Holland.

Three years ago, modern scientific techniques appeared to settle the matter when two sets of independent DNA tests compared fragments of the heart with samples of Queen Marie-Antoinette's hair.

Scientists concluded that the child was a Habsburg and, since only one member of that family had been held at the Temple at the time, he must be Louis XVII.

Although the results seemed irrefutable, the government initially refused to accept them, setting up a commission of scientists and historians to consider the matter. Only when they recently declared the heart to be that of the young king was permission finally granted for it to be buried, alongside his parents, in the royal crypt.

Philippe Delorme, a historian who arranged for the DNA tests, declared that there was "no doubt" that the heart belonged to Louis XVII. The French ministry of culture conceded that "mounting evidence" had persuaded it to approve the heart's transfer from urn to crypt.